In celebration of Kelley’s new book, You’ve Got This: A Pep Talk for Church Communicators, we’re talking about mistakes. Check out our ‘We All Make Mistakes’ Contest to share your story and enter to win a free copy.

Years ago at Life.Church, we created in-depth annual reports. In March 2011, after many painstaking hours of collaboration from multiple teams, we sent the files for our official 2010 report off to the printer. We couldn’t wait to hold the physical product in our hands.

Reports - Campuses - Volunteer - Error - Mission

As soon as the reports hit the campuses, a volunteer spotted an error. In our mission statement, no less:

Lead people to be to become fully devoted followers of Christ.

Thousands - Thousands - Reports - Locations - Time

Thousands and thousands of those annual reports were delivered to all of our locations, 13 of them at the time. I can still remember the adrenaline rush of panic that accompanied the only thought I could form: “Nooooooooooo!”

How in the world did we mess up one of the most memorized lines of text about our church? Actually, that was just the problem. We had so many sets of eyes on that piece, but no one truly read that part. We saw what we wanted to see, not what was actually there.